Introduction

MindtoEye represents the collective works of Martin van Velsen. Martin van Velsen is a senior research engineer in the Human
Computer Interaction institute and graduate student in the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.
He is the lead visualization developer for the CTAT authoring research group. Martin also works fulltime on research projects
of a wildly varied nature, some which are: neurosurgery simulations, large scale artificial intelligence architectures, virtual
humans and training simulations. Martin serves as technical adviser to many leading specialists in the field of serious games,
simulations, and digital entertainment. As a digital storytelling expert, Martin serves as research consultant to entertainment
companies including Fortune 500 companies. Martin has been a speaker and panel host for various entertainment technology
gatherings. Most recently he took part as a panelist at the PAX East gaming convention, but he has also organized such
scientific forums as a panel on Authoring Interactive Narrative at the Stanford Spring Symposium. Over the
last 18 years Martin has been responsible for shepherding open-ended research projects towards viable products that can be
deployed by such organizations as DARPA, Army Research Labs (ARL), Air Force Research Labs (AFRL) and the Office of Naval
Research (ONR). Finally Martin is an award winning artist, published fiction author, engineer, and a researcher in the field
of interactive narrative.

Ephemeral Essentialism

Ironically my version of art, which is an expression of humanity in all it's forms, usually goes towards a bare and austere representation. Call it essentialism if you will. Essentialism takes off the trivial and non essential layers of humanity and reveals its basic forms. As an extension it then allows the artist to find potential and future grace and explore ways in which to make otherwise invisible concepts available. An early attempt can be seen to the right in the top imagine. This represents a mask of a future humanity, a possible incarnation of rampant evolution in the abstract.

According to Wikipedia:

In philosophy, essentialism is the view that, for any specific kind of entity, there is a set of characteristics or properties all of which any entity of that kind must possess. Therefore all things can be precisely defined or described. In this view, it follows that terms or words should have a single definition and meaning.

Essentialism garnered a tremendous amount of criticm within philosophy, and rightfully so. However, using essentialism as a tool knowing its imperfections and shortcomings can be extremely useful. Within sculpture, breaking down a face into it's unique features and shapes can be the key to conveying a person's personality. Similarly we can use the key features that define a person's individuality to design a portrait containing one or more essenses of the subject.

I therefore work in terms of ephemeral essentialism, acknowledging that we only show and expose our core values, ingredients and individuality on very brief occasions.

Personal History

Essentialism as presented here stems from two distinct influences. First of all special makeup effects created a predisposition to see
the human face in a layered metaphor. Faces and human emotion are multi-layered expressions. We are multiple people, multiple experiences and we have multiple
ways of looking at the world. All of this is expressed by changing our features but we are hard pressed to emote multiple sensations at once. At any point
in time we are animals, intellectuals, students, parents, and many other beings. While working in special makeup effects a desire to take away layers became
important instead of adding more and more layers of clay on a cast of an actor's face. It is impossible to create a mask that takes away from an actors face and
we are stuck with distorted features and a poor representation of what the artist had in mind.

Sphinx Mask

Old age sculpture on top of plaster life mask

Current setup for 17th century oil painting

Laboratory

Overview

Hoop: a text mining and language exploration workbench in Java.
Primarily designed for event extraction and text-based event forecasting, the workbench is a generic text and language machine learning sandbox that can be adapted to a wide variety of tasks. Hoop is a collection of modules (hoops) each of which can take linguistic input from one, process it and pass it onto another. Combining those modules or hoops allows you to create complex analysis systems.

Features

Drag and Drop editor allowing you to stitch together custom tools and applications

Rich API and developer support for rapid text analysis prototyping

Large set of language oriented and related libraries with comprehensible API, see below

Many of the popular language processing tools are natively available directly from within the IDE. For example, shown below is a Hoop graph in which the last hoop is a visualization wrapper for the Standford NLP parse tree visualization panel. Below is an example of a graph that parses and shows a text file containing TREC questions.

Van Velsen, M., Narratoria, an Authoring Suite for Digital Interactive Narrative, accepted as a poster in proceedings of the 21st International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (2008)